Handheld devices and mobile devices are currently in wide use. Such devices can include, for example, cellular telephones, smart phones, personal digital assistants, multimedia players, palmtop computers, slate or tablet computers and even laptop computers. Many of these devices can easily be connected, over a wide area network (such as the Internet) to services that can be delivered from servers or other remote locations, worldwide.
Some of these devices, and particularly the handheld devices, have relatively small display screens. When an application runs in such a space-constrained environment, icons are often used to represent a particular concept and allow for rapid recognition by the user. An icon is a small typographical picture or symbol on a graphical user interface that represents something else, such as a program, command, file, directory (also referred to as a folder) or a device (such as a hard disc drive), etc. The symbol can be a picture or graphic, text or a combination. The symbol is displayed on a computer screen and can be used to navigate a computer system or a mobile device. An icon functions as an electronic hyperlink or file shortcut to access the program or data that it represents.
In many current systems, icons are pre-rendered at design time to correspond, intuitively, to the item that they represent.
However, in some systems, the items that are to be represented by an icon are created dynamically. For instance, in some customer relations management (CRM) systems, customers can create their own objects, and can also generate customized labels for those objects. Thus, the objects, the icons that represent those objects, and the labels, may not be known at design time so the objects (or other dynamically created items) can only be represented by icons at runtime, or during customization by the customer, or at least after design time.
In some current systems, in order to generate an icon that represents an item that was not know at design time, the designer simply pre-defines a plurality of different pictures that can be used at runtime. Then, when the dynamically created item (and its label) is created after design time, the creator selects or specifies which picture is to represent which dynamically created item. Of course, it is impossible to predict all of the different types of items that might be created, and so it can be very difficult to include enough pictures so that one will intuitively represent each of the dynamically created items.
In other current approaches, when a label is generated for the dynamically created item, the icon used to represent that item simply includes the entire text of the label. However, where the labels are long, this can present problems for displaying an icon on a relatively small display screen.
Where the text of the label is used instead of, or in addition to a picture, the text can be miniaturized to fit within a display field of an icon that can be adequately displayed on a relatively small display screen. However, this often results in an icon that has text displayed on it, where the text is undesirably small, making it difficult to read.
Yet another conventional approach is to predefine labels, at design time, for the dynamically created items. Again, however, it is nearly impossible to think of a sufficient number of labels such that one can intuitively represent every dynamically created item.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.